Qi-Ming Chen was member of the Gross group as a Ph.D. student between 2018 and 2022.

Ph.D. Thesis: Quantum Statistical Properties of a Superconducting Duffing Oscillator (2022)

Qi-Ming was born and raised in China. In 2014, he received his Bachelor degrees in Navigation, Guidance & Control (NGC) and Applied Mathematics from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (BUAA). In 2017, he received his Master degree in Control Science & Engineering from Tsinghua University, guided by Re-Bing Wu on quantum optimal control theory and Yu-xi Liu on superconducting quantum circuits. Later, he joined Herschel Rabitz’s group at Princeton University working on quantum time-optimal control experiments in NMR. In October 2018, he joined WMI and to study analogue quantum simulation with microwave cavities. In his Ph.D. thesis, he measured the non-equilibrium dynamics of a superconducting Duffing oscillator and reconciled the classical and quantum theories in a unified picture. He demonstrated that the steady states regarded as classically are in fact metastable states. By engineering the lifetime of the metastable states sufficiently large, he could observe a first-order dissipative phase transition which mimics a sudden change of the mean field in a 11-site Bose-Hubbard lattice. He also revealed the two distinct phases of the transition by quantum state tomography, i.e., a coherent phase and a squeezed phase separated by a critical point.    

In April 2022, he left WMI to start a postdoc position at Aalto University in Finland.